Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Embarrassing Times

At this point, I am finding the task of commenting on what is happening to the United States less than enjoyable. The whole thing has become an embarrassment.

Having spent many years living and working in the US, I justifiably feel implicated in what it does. Once upon a time its many crimes—bombing, invading, destroying and undermining countries around the world, poisoning the environment, promoting every sort of injustice for the sake of short-term profits—made me angry. It was the anger of youth, borne of the unfounded, optimistic conviction that it is possible to effect change by voicing one’s negative opinions. I am not so young any more, and have become dead certain that no amount of political involvement on my part (or yours, for that matter) would change anything at all, and so what I have been feeling for years now is not anger but sadness.

More recently this sadness has been overlaid with a sense of embarrassment, which has most recently become quite acute. It is one thing to rail against evil—a heroic, youthful stance—and quite another to feel self-consciously awkward in the presence of extreme stupidity. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that of the Americans—at least of those I see around me and hear and read in the press and the blogs—virtually none seem quite capable of experiencing or manifesting embarrassment about the sad state of their country. Perhaps my ability to feel embarrassed by the actions (and inactions) of those around me comes from some place else—an import that fails to thrive on the thin, toxified soil of American public life. The feelings that do thrive here are increasingly vicious: buckets of vitriol are being hurled across the political divide. The fact that this divide is nothing more than an artificial means of gaming a political system that has completely failed in its ability to express the popular will, or to harness it for any useful purpose, only serves to increase the embarrassment.

The ability to feel embarrassment is key to any possible new beginning, be it for a person, a group or a society as a whole. Allow me to explain…